Electronic voting systems enable a user (i.e. a voter) to rapidly provide voting information to a central entity by utilising one or more of the variety of communication networks commonly available. Subsequent to votes being received, electronic voting systems also enable the results to be calculated and disseminated in near real-time.
Electronic voting is frequently used to provide user interactivity for broadcast television content. For example, viewers of the broadcast are able to vote on an act in a talent show or answer a question in a quiz show. The ‘uplink’ from the viewer to the broadcaster can be provided by, for example, the PSTN via a touch-tone telephone, a mobile communication network's short message service (SMS) or the internet. To determine the result, the votes can be simply aggregated and the results can be presented as part of the broadcast itself. A time-cut off is generally provided, before which a vote must be received to be counted.
However, such voting systems are very simplistic, as they only provide a single snapshot on the user's opinion on the broadcast event. In particular, they do not enable any determination of how additional information provided in the broadcast affects the opinions of the users. For example, after the event has occurred and users can start voting, subsequent information can affect the initial impressions of the user. As a result of this, the user can, for example, change their mind. In some examples, the submission of a second vote by the user as a result of changing their mind only serves to cancel out the overall effect of the previous vote. This type of data cannot be captured nor handled by the above-mentioned electronic voting systems.
There is therefore a need for a technique to enable electronic voting on events occurring in a real-time video broadcast that handles and determines the impact of additional information on voting results without interrupting the display of the broadcast. There is also a need for a technique that achieves this whilst providing voting accuracy despite the limitations of communication networks such as transmission delays and congestion, and is scalable to demand yet simple enough to be cheaply deployed to end users.